by Tad Williams
That’s me, he thought. That’s what I’ll be like as far as these Sithi-folk are concerned. I’ll be around for a little while, then before they even realize I’m getting old, I’ll be dead. The thought brought a lump of terror into his throat. Suddenly, he wanted nothing more than to be around his own short-lived kind—even Rachel the Dragon—rather than these soft-spoken, cat-eyed immortals.
Filled with restlessness, he sprang up from the riverbank, kicking his way through the reeds as he pushed back toward the path. He almost bumped into someone: a Sitha-man, dressed only in a pair of thin, loose-fitting blue breeches, who stood in the undergrowth and gazed out toward the river. For a moment, Simon thought this stranger had been spying on him, but the fine-boned face showed no expression at Simon’s approach. The Sitha continued to stare out past him as the youth walked by. The stranger was singing quietly to himself, a breathy melody of sibilances and pauses. His attention was fixed on a tree growing out of the riverbank, half-submerged in the current
Simon could not restrain a grunt of irritation. What was wrong with these people? They wandered around like sleepwalkers, said things that made no sense—even Jiriki sometimes talked mysterious, circular nonsense, and the prince was by far the most direct of this tribe—and they all looked at Simon as though he were an insect. When they bothered to notice him at all.
Several times Simon had encountered Sithi who he was certain were Ki’ushapo and Sijandi, the pair who had accompanied Jiriki and Simon’s company north from the Aldheorte to the base of Urmsheim, but the Sithi showed no recognition, made no sign of greeting. Simon could not swear beyond any doubt that the faces were theirs, but something in the way they steadfastly avoided his eye assured him that he was correct.
After the journey across the northern waste, both Jiriki’s kinsman An’nai and the Erkynlandish soldier Grimmric had died on the dragon-mountain Urmsheim, beneath the icy waterfall known as the Uduntree. They had been buried together, mortal and immortal, something which Jiriki had said was unprecedented, a binding between their two races unknown for centuries. Now Simon, a mortal, had come to forbidden Jao é-Tinukai’i.
Ki’ushapo and Sijandi might not approve of his being here, but they knew he had saved their prince Jiriki, and they knew Simon was Hikka Staja, an Arrow-Bearer—so why should they avoid him so completely? If Simon was wrong in his identification, it should still be simple enough for the real pair to seek him out, since he was the only one of his kind among their folk. Were they so angry at his being here that they could not even greet him? Were they in some way embarrassed for Jiriki, that the prince should have brought such a creature to their secret valley? Then why did they not say so, or say something? At least Jiriki’s uncle Khendraja’aro made his dislike of mortals plain and public.
Thinking of these slights put Simon in a foul humor. He muddled his way up the stream bank, fuming. It took all his restraint not to turn back to the river-watching Sitha and shove his handsome, alien face into the mud.
Simon struck out across the valley, not with any idea of escape this time, but rather to walk off some of his restless irritation. His stiff-legged strides carried him past several more Sithi. Most walked by themselves, although a few strolled in unspeaking pairs. Some looked at him with unblinking interest, others did not seem to notice him at all. One group of four sat quietly listening to the singing of a fifth, their eyes intent on the delicate gliding movements of the singer’s hands.
Merciful Aedon, he grumbled to himself, what are they thinking about all the time? They’re worse than Doctor Morgenes! Although the doctor, too, had been prone to long silences, unbroken but for his distracted, tuneless humming, at least at the end of a day he would unstop a jug of beer and teach Simon some history, or make suggestions about his apprentice’s rather blobby handwriting.
Simon kicked a fir cone and watched it roll. He did have to admit that the Sithi were beautiful. Their grace, the flowing line of their garments, their serene faces, all made him feel like some mud-covered mongrel bumping against the table linens of a great lord’s house. Though his captivity infuriated him, sometimes a cruel inner voice whispered that it was only justice. He had no right to be in this place, and having come, an urchin like Simon should never be allowed to return and sully the immortals with his tales. Like jack Mundwode’s man Osgal in the story, he had gone down into a fairy-mound. The world could never be the same.
Simon’s pace slowed from an angry march to a slouch. Before long, he began to hear the steady ringing of water on stone. He looked up from his grass-stained boots to discover that he had wandered right across the valley into the shade of the hills. A stirring of hope made itself felt inside him. He was near the Pools, as Aditu had called them; the Summer Gate stood nearby. It seemed that by not thinking about finding his way out, he had been able to do what he had failed so miserably to accomplish in days past.
Trying to imitate the degree of not-caring that had brought him this far, Simon wandered off the path, angling toward the sound of splashing water, staring up into the overarching trees with what he hoped was suitable nonchalance. Within a few steps he had left the sunlight and entered the cool shadow of the hills, where he made his way up grass-tangled slopes carpeted in shy blue gilly-flowers and white starblooms. As the song of falling water grew louder he had to restrain himself from breaking into a run; instead, he stopped to rest against a tree, precisely as if he were in the middle of a contemplative walk. He stared at the stripes of sunshine lancing down through the leaves and listened to his own gradually slowing breath. Then, just when he had nearly forgotten where he was going—did he only fancy that he could hear the rush of water suddenly increase?—he started up the hill once more.
As he reached the summit of this first slope, certain that he would see the bottom most of the Pools before him, he found himself standing instead on the rim of a circular valley. The valley’s upper slopes were covered by a host of white birch trees whose leaves were just now turning summer-yellow. They rattled softly in the breeze, like bits of golden parchment. Beyond the birches, the next level of the valley was thickly grown with silvery-leaved trees that trembled as the wind continued its sweep down toward the valley floor.
At the base of the circular valley, in the depths within the ring of silver leaves, lay a vegetative darkness that Simon’s eyes could not pierce. Whatever things grew there also took the wind in their turn: a sort of clattering whisper arose from the valley’s shadowed deeps, a sound that might have been the scraping of breeze-blown leaves and branches, or just as easily the hiss of a thousand slim knives being drawn from a thousand delicate sheaths.
Simon let out his pent-up breath. The scent of the valley rose up to him, musty and bittersweet. He caught the smell of growing things, a pungent odor like mown grass, but also a deep and intoxicating spiciness reminiscent of the bowls of hippocras Morgenes had mulled on cold evenings. He took another whiff and felt strangely drunken. There were other scents, too, a dozen, a hundred—he could smell roses growing against an old stonewall, stable muck. rain puffing on dusty ground, the salty tang of blood, and the similar but by no means identical odor of sea-brine. He shivered like a wet dog and felt himself drawn a few steps down the slope.
“I am sorry. You may not go there.”
Simon whirled to see a Sitha-woman standing on the hilltop behind him. For a moment he thought it was Aditu. This one wore a wisp of cloth around her loins and nothing else. Her skin was red-golden in the slanting sunlight.
“What…?”
“You may not go there.” She spoke his mortal tongue carefully. There was no ill humor on her face. “I am sorry, but you may not.” She took a step forward and looked at him curiously. “You are the Sudhoda’ya who saved Jiriki.”
“So? Who are you?” he asked sullenly. He didn’t want to look at her breasts, her slim but well-muscled legs, but it was nearly impossible not to. He felt himself growing angry.
“My mother named me Maye’sa,” she said, making each wor
d too precisely, as if Simon’s language were a trick she had learned but never before performed. Her white hair was streaked with gold and black. Staring at her long, coiled tresses—a safe place to let his eyes rest—Simon suddenly realized that all the Sitha had white hair, that the myriad of different rainbow colors that made them seem like outlandish birds were just dyes. Even Jiriki, with his odd, heather-flower shade—dyes! Artifice! Just like the harlot-women that Father Dreosan had ranted about during his sermons in the Hayholt chapel! Simon felt his anger deepening. He turned his back on the Sitha-woman and started downward into the valley.
“Come back, Seoman Snowlock,” she called. “That is the Year-Dancing Grove. You may not go there.”
“Stop me,” he growled. Maybe she would put an arrow in his back. He had seen Aditu’s terrifying facility with a bow just a few mornings before, when Jiriki’s sister had put four arrows side by side into a tree limb at fifty paces. He had little doubt that others of her sex were just as competent, but at this moment he cared little. “Kill me if you want to,” he added, then wondered if such a remark might strain his luck.
Half-hunching his shoulders, he strode down the slope into the whispering birches. No arrow came, so he risked a backward look. The one called Maye’sa still stood where he had left her. Her thin face seemed puzzled.
He began to run down the hillside, past row after row of white, papery-barked trunks. After a moment, he noticed that the slope was leveling off. When he found himself beginning to run uphill he stopped, then walked until he found a spot from which he could look about and discover where he was. The entirety of the great bowl still lay beneath him, but he had somehow moved around the valley’s rim from the spot where the Sitha-woman stood, watching.
Swearing in fury, he started down the slope once more, but experienced the same feeling of leveling, swiftly followed by the resumption of an upward slant. He had gotten no closer to the bottom—he was still, as far as he could tell, only a third of the way through the ring of birch trees.
Attempts to turn away from the uphill slope also met with failure. The wind sighed in the branches, the birch leaves rustled, and Simon felt himself struggling as though in a dream, making no headway despite all his exertions. At last, in a paroxysm of frustration, he closed his eyes and ran. His terror turned into a moment of heady exhilaration as he felt the ground sloping away beneath his feet. Tree branches slapped at his face, but some peculiar luck kept him from striking any of the hundreds of trunks that lay in the path of his headlong flight.
When he stopped and opened his eyes, he was back at the top of the hillside once more. Maye’sa stood before him, her gauzy bit of skirt fluttering in the restless breeze.
“I told you, you may not go into the Year-Dancing Grove,” she said, explaining a painful truth to a child. “Did you think you could?” Stretching her sinuous neck, she shook her head. Her eyes were wide, inquisitive. “Strange creature.”
She vanished back down the hillside toward Jao é-Tinukai’i. A few moments later, Simon followed. Head down, watching his boot toes scuffing through the grass, he soon found himself standing on the path before Jiriki’s house. Evening was coming on and the crickets were singing by the river-pond.
“Very good, Seoman,” Aditu said the next day. She examined the shent board, nodding. “Misdirection! To go away from that which you wish to gain. You are learning.” “It doesn’t always work,” he said glumly. Her eyes glittered. “No. Sometimes you need a deeper strategy. But it is a beginning.”
Binabik and Sludig had not come far into the forest, only deep enough to shelter their camp from the bitter wind sweeping down the plains, a wind whose voice had become a ceaseless howling. The horses shifted uneasily on their tethers, and even Qantaqa seemed restless. She had just returned from her third excursion into the forest, and now sat with ears erect, as though listening for some expected but nonetheless dire warning. Her eyes gleamed with reflected firelight.
“Do you think we are any safer here, little man?” Sludig asked, sharpening his swore. “I think I would rather face the empty plains than his forest.”
Binabik frowned. “Perhaps, but would you rather also be facing hairy giants like those we saw?”
The White Way
, the great road that spanned the northern borders of Aldheorte, had turned at last by the forest’s easternmost edge, leading them south for the first time since they had come down off the Old Tumet’ai Road
with Simon many days earlier. Not long after the southward turn, they had spotted a group of white shapes moving in the distance behind them—shapes that they both realized could be nothing but Hunën. The giants, once unwilling to leave their hunting lands at the foot of Stormspike, now seemed to range the length and breadth of the northland. Remembering the destruction that a band of these creatures had wreaked on their large traveling party, neither troll nor Rimmersgarder had any false hopes that the two of them could survive an encounter with the shaggy monstrosities.
“What makes you sure we are any safer because we have come a few furlongs into the woods?” demanded Sludig.
“Nothing that is certain,” Binabik admitted, “but I know that the small, creeping diggers are reluctant to tunnel into Aldheorte. Perhaps the giants may be having similar reluctance.”
Sludig snorted and made the blade rasp loudly on the whetstone. “And the Hunë that Josua killed near Naglimund, when the boy Simon was found? That one was in the forest, was it not?”
“That giant was driven to there,” Binabik said irritably. He pushed the second of the leaf-wrapped birds into the coals. “There are no promises in life, Sludig. but it seems to me smarter to take fewer chances.”
After a short silence, the Rimmersman spoke up. “You speak rightly, troll. I am only tired. I wish we would get where we are going, to this Farewell Stone! I would like to give Josua his damnable sword, then sleep for a week. In a bed.”
Binabik smiled. “With certainty. But it is not Josua’s sword, or at least I am not sure it is meant for him.” He stood and took the long bundle from where it leaned against a tree. “I am not sure what it is for at all.” Binabik’s fingers unwrapped the blade, allowing its dark surface to show. The firelight revealed no more than its dark outlines. “Do you see?” Binabik said, hefting the bundle in his arms. “Thorn now seems to think it is acceptable for a small troll to carry it.”
“Don’t talk about it as if it were alive,” Sludig said, sketching a hasty Tree in the air. “That is against nature.”
Binabik eyed him. “It may not be alive, as a bear or a bird or a man is alive, but there is something in it that is more than sword-metal. You know that, Sludig.”
“That may be.” The Rimmersman frowned. “No, curse it, I do know. That is why I do not like speaking of it. I have dreams about the cave where we found the thing.”
“That is not surprising to me,” the troll said softly. “That was a fearsome place.”
“But it is not just the place—not even the worm, or Grimmric’s death. I dream of the damnable sword, little man. It was laying there among those bones as though it waited for us. Cold, cold, like a snake in its den…”
Sludig trailed off. Binabik watched him, but said nothing.
The Rimmersman sighed. “And I still do not understand what good having it will do Josua.”
“No more do I, but it is a powerful thing. It is good to remember that.”
Binabik stroked the glinting surface as he might the back of a cat. “Look at it, Sludig. We have been so caught up in our trials and losses that we have almost been forgetting Thorn. This is an object that is making legends! Perhaps it is the greatest weapon ever to have come to light in Osten Ard—greater than Hern’s spear Oinduth, greater than Chukku’s sling.”
“Powerful it may be,” Sludig grumbled, “but I have doubts as to how lucky it is. It didn’t save Sir Camaris, did it?”
Binabik showed a small, secretive smile. “But he did not have it when he was swept over the side in F
irannos Bay: Towser the jester told that to us. That is why we were able to discover it on the dragon-mountain. Otherwise it would be at ocean’s bottom—like Camaris.”
The wind shrieked, rattling the branches overhead. Sludig waited an appropriate interval, then moved closer to the comforting fire. “How could such a great knight fall off a boat? God grant that I die more honorably, in battle. It only proves to me, if I had any doubts, that boats are things best left alone.”
Binabik’s yellow grin widened. “To be hearing such words from one whose ancestors were the greatest sailors mankind has known!” His expression grew serious. “Although it must be told that some doubt Camaris was swept into the sea. Some there are who say that he was drowning himself.”
“What? Why in Usires’ name would he do such a thing?” Sludig poked at the fire indignantly.
The troll shrugged. “It is only being rumor, but I do not ignore such things. Morgenes’ writings are filled with many strange stories. Qinkipa! How I wish I had found more time for reading the doctor’s book! One thing Morgenes was telling in his life-story of Prester John was that Sir Camaris was much like our Prince Josua: a man of strange, melancholy moods. Also, he was much in admiration of John’s queen, Ebekah. King Prester John had made Camaris her special protector. When the Rose of Hernysadharc—as many were naming her—died in the birthing of Josua, Camaris was said to be much upset. He grew fell and strange, and railed against his God and Heaven. He gave up sword and armor and other things, as one who takes up a life of religion—or, as one who knows he will die. He was making his way back to his home in Vinitta after a pilgrimage to the Sancellan Aedonitis. In a storm he was lost in the ocean off Harcha-island.”
Binabik leaned forward and began pulling the wrapped birds out of the fire, exerting caution so as not to burn his stubby fingers. The fire crackled and the wind moaned.
“Welladay,” Sludig said at last. “What you say only makes me more sure that I will avoid the high and the mighty whenever possible. But for Duke Isgrimnur, who has a good level head on his shoulders, the rest of them are drifty and foolish as geese. Your Prince Josua, if you will pardon my saying it, first among them.”